Conversable launched the first Twitter-based automated conference guide at CES

In November, Twitter announced two new features — quick replies and welcome messages — to help automate business responses in Direct Messages.

The social network wrote in a blog post that the new features…

“… can enable faster resolutions by helping customers more easily provide information to solve problems before an agent sees the first message, or they can simplify automated services and transactional flows that were difficult in the past.”

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held last week in Las Vegas, conversational platform Conversable added its natural language processing/intelligent platform to Twitter’s automated features to create the first conference guide using Twitter.

Conversable CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm told me that, in a typical use case for the CES Twitter Guide, a conference attendee with a meeting shortly at Qualcomm may have forgotten the booth’s location.

Instead of downloading and using the CES app, the attendee can search for @CES on Twitter, go to their page, and click on “message us” — assuming in this case that CES has turned off the need for the user to be a follower before direct messaging them.

When the “message us” screen opens, there are quick buttons for an interactive map, a list of speeches, trending messages and other linked functions. Additionally, the Guide looks for keywords. The user can then type “Qualcomm booth” and the automated response can show the location.

The CES Twitter Guide

Lamm pointed out that Twitter doesn’t have natural language processing and intelligence, which Conversable’s platform provides. Twitter, he said, supplies different levels of automated functions.

The Austin, Texas-based Conversable offers an enterprise-level platform that is provided as a managed service for the creation of automated conversational experiences (that is, bots) for Facebook Messenger, Twitter, SMS, Amazon Alexa, Kik, Skype for Business and Yammer.

Winson Wong, partnerships manager in business development at Twitter, told me via email that since the new features were launched in November, it has been used by brands to automate customer service and other experiences through Direct Messages. The CES Guide, he said, is intended to offer top hashtags, company booth and event locations, speaker schedule, answers to FAQs and human assistance via the CES social team.

“The bot to human handover experience is really important for us,” Wong said, “so we made it seamless and simple to reach a real human agent from CES any time to answer questions that the bot was not able to help support.”

He added that “the unique thing about Twitter’s messaging platform is that brands can take people from a public Tweet to a private message and then back out to a public Tweet.”